They were hard times for apocalyptists: When the Gulf War broke out in early 1990, the English group Massive Attack quickly renamed itself Massive in protest. A good year later, peace having been »successfully« – according to the model of the New World Order – established in the Middle East, the group reassumed its original name. Even then it was apparent that the catastrophic in the popular imagination was not actually to be stopped by realpolitical developments.

Not to be stopped – but perhaps able to be recontextualized: In the autumn of 2001, pop apocalyptists (and not only they) again fell on hard times, whether we're talking about bands like Anthrax, whose name cannot retrospectively even be shrugged off as a poor joke; or about the ragga scene, which has long been predicting doom for the Babylonians together with their towers; or about catastrophe scenarios in films. People have wanted to put the latter on hold for a while – understandably – but soon such scenarios will doubtless re-enter the field of everyday fantasy in massive proportions. Because they have always been imbedded there. What did occur, at least for a short while, was a sort of compulsive recoding that gave all products of this sort an unpleasant déjà-vu component. Not that anything in a catastrophe film could have really been anticipated. No, the events put themselves, in a dramatic »act of infection« (Theweleit), at the beginning of any chain of semanticization, which made it possible from then on to link or associate everything back to this beginning.

This was also the case at »RESFEST 2001,« which stopped off at the Tischmann Auditorium of the New School in Manhattan about a month after the »events.« Even though the »healing power of art« was invoked at the opening, exactly the opposite mechanism could be observed in many parts of the program: in Rodney Ascher's »Triumph of Victory,« for example, an airforce captain falls from his plane during the war at an altitude of 10,000 meters, and plunges downwards– using the best digital flat-figure animation – without a parachute amid a hail of bombs. The association was not all that difficult to make. In Bryan Boyce's »State of the Union,« a President Bush animated in the style of the Teletubby suns shoots rabbits on a huge oil field dead with his dumb looks: again, this was not far from the events of a few days before, when this very president gave the order to go into action in the Afghanistan war. And in the video clip »Juxtaposed with U,« which the two French directors Antoine Bardou-Jacquet and Ludovic Houplain made for the group Super Furry Animals, a fire breaks out in a club high above the roofs of Manhattan that is easily recognizable as »Windows of the World« in the WTC. It becomes a veritable »disco inferno« that takes on a particularly traumatic aspect owing to the vivid infrared pictures.

Admittedly, all these works were finished long before September 2001, just as the entire festival, which is now successfully touring through 13 international cities in its fifth year and constantly expanding, had been scheduled since the summer. The fact that a large number of the videos shown were able to exhibit such an extreme degree of unintended significance was not so much a result of the festival directors' decision not to change the selected program once it had been made. It was, rather, the irrefutable presence of catastrophic scenarios themselves, which have always infected the popular imagination and cannot simply be deleted from it. For example, in Paul Donnellon's clip for Orbitals, »Oi!«, two oversized toy monsters plod through Paris crushing the city's symbols; and the comics band Gorillaz shoots everything to pieces that gets in their way in their video »19-2000« ... and so on and so forth. It seems in general as if digital technology (Final Cut Pro, After Effects, etc.) favors the visualization of apocalyptic fantasies and correspondingly uncontrolled bloodbaths of doom.

Some exceptions proved that it does not always have to be like this: Virgil Widrich's »Copy Shop,« for instance, in which the protagonist – and thus the entire film – gets more and more tangled up in itself in endless self-copies. Or the video »Svitjod 2000+« by the two Swedes Marten Nilsson and David Flamholc, in which the two filmmakers travel through Sweden's sparsely populated North with the question »Wouldn't it be nice if more foreigners lived here?« Quickly activate Premiere 4.2 and After Effects, and you've already conjured up a skyline à la Manhattan in the barren landscape. Except that, now, nothing in that model city is the way it used to be; or, at least, everything can only be thought of against the background of the catastrophic.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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